New Year preperations

After the excesses of Christmas my thoughts are turning to putting in a bit of hard labour down at the plots. Here's a brief summary of how it went for me since March.

My leeks weren't great, I fed them "fish, blood and bone" and they were planted in after the spuds so there was plenty of manure in there for them. I think that spot of ground was just too wet for the leeks and they ended up being a bit weak...weak leeks there's a good pun in there somewhere. I left them over wintering and they still look passable if small, but I haven't been down in the last few days and the snow might have done for them.

The celery turned out great but I grew WAY too much, I'll be reining myself in next year.

I tried to pack way too many pumpkins into too small a spot and what I ended up with was alot of small pumpkins and squashes. With the wet summer alot of these rotted aswell so I ended up with only 8 or 9 usable specimens. They made nice soup and chutneys though.

My cabbages were a total disaster. I think my netting wasn't a tight enough mesh so they were riddled with caterpillars. Major slug damage aswell towards the end of the summer. I would say the cabbage fiasco was just down to me not paying enough attention.

On the success side of things were the spuds (the axona and mira did well despite the blight), chard (although some of it bolted in that hot spell when we were all worried about the water), beetroot, white turnips, carrots (didn't grow enough though), onions, peas, spinach (bolted a bit in the heat aswell though).

My plans for this year are to do alot more successional sowings. I'll be follwing Gerry Dalys advice and harvesting when things are alot smaller, to keep continuity of supply. Lots more fruit for me this year aswell, I'm getting a load off Future Forests at the end of the month. There's deals on bulk buying so if anyones interested in going in on something drop me a line. Some sort of a fence and some proper little frames for netting the beds (ala Jim and Paddy) are on the wishlist aswell.

Hope to see you all down there.

PS: If ever you get a little disillusioned with the plot have a read of Soilman